II
The Fight to Work
The steps of Number 259, Mare Street, Hackney, are worn down with the countless feet that have trod them in search of succour. None have been turned empty away. It is the end of a pilgrimage of infinite pain, where the weary and heavy-laden can find respite from their suffering.
In the course of last year the receiving station dealt with 1,298 cases. It was one of the first of the Salvation Army centres, and the house, many years old, has none of the rigidity of an institution. It is large, rambling, unexpected, like the families of the last century, and it preserves the atmosphere and tradition of a Home.
I went again to Number 259, and those parts which were closed to me the night I was given shelter I visited, and saw for myself how the inmates live. The work is divided between urgently necessitous cases and those for which time and consideration is required. From all over London, and indeed England, women and girls arrive. If a domestic servant stays out later than she has permission to do, she can always find admission in Mare Street, Hackney. If a girl comes up from the country hoping to get a situation and is disappointed, the police send her to the receiving centre. Each case is kept for a night and then referred to the Army Headquarters on the other side of the road. The Headquarters institute inquiries. I do not mean that they persecute the unfortunate applicant with merciless interrogations. Poverty is no deterrent, and even if the out-of-work has no reference, the deficiency can be dealt with. In the latter case, the girl is offered a sojourn in a training centre, from whence she is found a situation. If, on the other hand, a reference be forthcoming she stays at the shelter until a place is found for her, and from that time on regards Mare Street as her home. Any girl who has once stayed there is free to come for her holidays, or to spend her evenings off, she will meet girls of her own age, and as a rule regards the matron or the adjutant as friend and adviser.
There are forty-five beds in the house. Of these a fair proportion are filled by temporary visitors. Many cases of attempted suicide are brought to Mare Street, when young mothers, maddened by poverty and suffering have tried to take their own lives and their children’s. These women are nursed back to health for weeks or months, as the case may be, and from the Shelter return once more to the big world. Unmarried mothers, as I have said, come in considerable numbers. They wait at the Shelter until Headquarters make arrangements for them at a maternity home. There are a few cases of inebriates, who do not wish to go into an Institution. These remain at the Shelter until they regain normal health and self-control.
Perhaps I can best express the spirit which animates this place by describing a talk I had with the matron. She is a woman of very wide experience, and I asked her what in her opinion were the chief causes of the misery and starvation of the outcast. I have heard so much of the evils of drink, so many statistics have been forced upon me proving that the outcasts have but themselves to blame for their condition, that I waited very eagerly for the answer.
“Generally speaking, it’s poverty,” she answered, “and very largely, the shortage of housing. Illness, bad luck, increase of rent, drive many a decent woman out of her home and force her to become a tramp on the road, or to sell matches in the street. Humanity is very decent—at least, I find it so; it’s only very seldom that you can say a woman is down and out by her own fault.”
The Mare Street Shelter is the only receiving station of its kind in London, and as will be seen it covers every department of destitution. Some of the women who first found their way there years ago still keep up their connection, and the club room in the garden, reserved for the use of former inmates, is always crowded on a Wednesday or Sunday night. The garden when I last went there was full of flowers, and some dozen babies were peacefully sleeping in the sun. These, with their mothers, are those temporary cases which I have already described. There are always babies in the Shelter. They look very well and are extremely happy.
Notwithstanding the admirable work of the Shelter, its accommodation for the permanently destitute is necessarily limited—but no one is refused a bed if there be one vacant, and the police, before now, have brought a woman all across London to get her a lodging for the night. The young unmarried mother is but an immediate problem—practical help and sympathy will ultimately set her on her feet with her child. Suicides, even drunkards, are only temporarily incapacitated; but what can be done for the woman whom destitution has driven, literally, into the streets, without a home, a change of clothes, without even the means to keep herself clean? Mare Street does its best to help, but obviously only a small proportion of the army of outcasts can be relieved there.
And of this proportion a certain percentage will not ask for help. It is a mistake to suppose that those women whom you can see any night huddled up in doorways, in back streets, cowering under the arches by the river, are not conscious of their rags and dirt. Believe me, they have no preference for dirt, but to be clean costs money, and such is their state that even if they could spare a few coppers necessary for a wash, no public baths or lavatories would admit them. Thus, it is but seldom that Mare Street receives a call from the utterly down and out. All women have their personal pride; it is perhaps the last thing that leaves us. Such as I refer to go elsewhere for a bed. If they have as much as fivepence they can get a clean, not too hard, bed at another Army Shelter in Hansbury Street, Whitechapel. This I shall describe later. I mention it now as one of the few places where matchsellers and kindred traders can get a bed without fear of inspection, or even criticism.
In relation to Mare Street Shelter, it is good to know that it is held in the memory of very many with affectionate gratitude. And, once more, I take pleasure in dealing with an argument the ignorant are continually advancing. It is often said that a girl who has “fallen”—most hideous and obscene description—once, will “fall” again, and that the majority of unmarried mothers find their way to prostitution. This is contradicted alike by figures, facts and experience. My little Madonna of the club foot, about to have her second baby, will remain the same brave, kindly and hardworking woman should she have twenty illegitimate children rather than two. According to the matron, the majority of unmarried mothers who have been through their hands are doing very well, earning enough to keep their child at a foster mother’s or even, in many cases, getting enough to make a home for them both.
Something of what these girls feel is expressed in a letter I received when I was writing an account of my experiences for a Sunday newspaper. I had many letters, but this, I think, was the most poignant and revealing.
“I happen to know 259, Mare Street, Hackney, rather well. I am still indebted to them for a free and deliciously warm dinner, which came as a veritable gift from the gods, one cold, wet winter’s day, some two years ago, after I, like one of the women you write of, had been walking—walking—till my whole body ached.
“Later I went to another Salvation Army Rescue Home—this time more thoughtfully called ‘Home for Mothers and Babies.’ There I remained for seven months, hiding from a curious and unsympathetic world, the shame I had brought on myself, living with just the sort of girl you saw at Mare Street that night, and many other sorts too; girls taken from practically every walk of life, ex-chorus, factory, office, shop and servant girls, with here and there a waitress or a farmer’s daughter; plenty of types, plenty of different perspectives, and always plenty of courage; that was the most wonderful part of it all, the courage which these girls, mostly the victims of an unfortunate fate, displayed in the face of overwhelming tragedy. A hopeless, blank future, with the added burden of an illegitimate child to support.
“The tragic look of your dark-eyed Jewess recalls to my mind the look of the girls who were with me waiting to ‘go down.’ It seemed they always wore that dull, frightened stare, and their smiles were so rueful!
“Later they would return from the Woman’s Hospital at Clapton, hugging tightly their precious woollen, cuddly bundle of humanity, their faces paler and manner subdued; some were only eighteen, mostly all in their early twenties, but they have lived and seen life.
“As week succeeded week, and the end of the six months (the ordered time to remain after baby is born) draws to a close, you would see they get perturbed. The fatal day arrives—the parting is hard, ah, how hard only God knows! Tomorrow those arms will be empty. That baby will be in a strange foster home, that mother will be breaking her heart, working feverishly, possibly taking her first place (as a general servant in a Jewish household) working like grim death to kill the ache. Oh, the horror of that first night in a strange bed, with no cot to rock, a nameless child, perhaps, but a mother’s baby for all that. Today as she says ‘Goodbye, girls,’ she smiles, yes, even laughs outright, shrilly, and when someone says ‘Good luck, dear,’ the tears will trickle down her cheeks, still she smiles, waves her hand almost flippantly. ‘Thanks, awfully. See you again.’ The big, brown door swings on its hinges—she is gone—gone—to face—what?
“I have seen several of them again quite recently, those girls who shared a tragic period with me. I think they have nearly all altered, they are happy enough and quite smart, too, some of them—not all; marvellous how it is done on, say nine shillings weekly dress allowance and pin money, for baby and self, isn’t it? The ones I have in my mind’s eye are not prostitutes, just ordinary girls living ordinary lives to the best of their ability, making and getting the very best they can out of what is left from the wreck.
“Yes, and you mention, I notice, the ‘Good night’ and ‘God bless you,’ of that Salvation Army officer. Did that cheer you? It cheered me more than once when I lay on a tear-drenched pillow night after night; made me feel someone did care after all, and there must be many poor down and outs who have derived comfort from that very homely phrase.”
I have been over some of the Salvation Army Maternity Homes and, though in some the conditions are more comfortable than others, they are all animated by the same spirit of uncritical helpfulness. Other maternity homes there are, excellently sanitated and most hygienic, where the unmarried mother is nailed to the cross of intolerance, and branded with what the female warders call her “shame.”
I want to make it again quite plain that before I started on my voyage of exploration I knew absolutely nothing of the Salvation Army centres, shelters or homes. If there be any value in this account of my experience, it must lie in this, that I write only of what I myself have seen and felt and known.
It will be plain that one contingent of the outcast world is fairly well provided for. The unmarried mother, of whatever class, does not find it very difficult to discover a kindly hand, and, as I have said, once her difficulty is over, it is probable she will meet safe harbourage in quiet waters. The remaining sections of destitute womanhood compromise, amongst others, itinerant street vendors, itinerant office cleaners and odd job charwomen. All these belong to a floating population, without home or habitation, living from hand to mouth, sleeping how and when and where they can.
Another section is the cheaper kind of prostitute. The girl, or young woman, who, without a roof over her head, or a room in which to prosecute her trade, has to play her calling up blind alleys, in dark places, for a few pence. These find a bed—when they have sufficient money—in the public lodging houses at prices ranging from tenpence to one and two. Then again, you have the women on the road, who peddle matches, hairpins and other trifles, and cover a definite route, returning to London every few weeks. These women for the most part put up at casual wards or doss houses. They are a very definite type, sturdy of physique and of spirit. They have been forced to this mode of life through the tragic scarcity of housing, and the falling in the purchasing power of the shilling.
There is a deplorable lack of proper accommodation for the itinerant London outcast. Be she matchseller or prostitute, she should have the opportunity of getting a decent bed on payment of a fixed sum. Outside the Salvation Army shelters, the standard of cleanliness is variable. Among the public lodging houses, run for individual profit, it is extremely low, and in some of these places the beds are stained, the blankets dirty, the washing accommodation of the most rudimentary kind, and this, it is somewhat disconcerting to find, in houses licensed by the London County Council and under its inspection. Certain religious bodies other than the Salvation Army also run women’s lodging houses; these I shall deal with in turn. I have stayed at nearly all of them and know their slightest variation from type.
Here I feel is the place for me to protest against the apathy which prevails with regard to the state of these public lodging houses. I have written to women M.P.’s, women Country Councillors and I have urged on them the necessity for reform. I have received letters of courtesy meaning nothing; and I ask myself for what reason women are in politics if not to fight for decent conditions for their sex? I am not a feminist; that is to say I hold no brief for the view that man is the cause of injustice to woman. But I contend that it is a deliberate and unjustifiable injustice that the London County Council—England’s premier civic authority—should provide spacious, clean, comfortable lodging houses for me, replete with bathrooms and every modern hygienic appliance, and at the same time refuse to consider the supply of similar accommodation for women.
Why should a woman, if she can pay, be compelled to sleep in a dirty bed when for the same price a man can get a clean one? I have walked from one end of London to the other, looking for a bed, and I have been treated as though I was a criminal trying to steal. I could not have dreamed that in this day of feminine emancipation from political disabilities that trade union leaders, women preachers and doctors, barristers, lawyers and under secretaries, would all have passed by on the other side, leaving their sisters to find refuge in squalor, or to spend the night walking the inhospitable streets.
I have run the gamut of lodging house accommodation. I have slept in the same room as matchsellers, tramps and prostitutes, and the general conditions—always excepting the Salvation Army—are a standing reproach to every woman who believes in what she calls social reform or has any touch of feeling for her sex.
That I speak with knowledge will be shown in the detailed accounts herein following of the places I have visited.